“I don’t see why you can’t date Becky or Elaine or Lacey Freeman,” Mark said.
“Gross,” I said. “Lacey Freeman?”
“Okay, not Lacey. But Jane? Jane Germeroth is perfect for you. Jane Germeroth is smart and she has good boobs. Listen to me, Nick. Cut your hair. You look like a drummer in some shitty band. You look like a fucking bartender. Also, your scarf is gay.”
My scarf was gay indeed. It had cost several hundred dollars, but it was beautiful—red and white checkered silk with long tassels.
“And it’s offensive,” Mark went on. “It’s supposed to look like what Yasir Arafat wears on his head. Now teenagers are wearing polyester versions like it’s some hip-hop thing.”
“This is silk,” I protested. “From Barneys.”
“You know you can buy that shit on the street in Chinatown for ten dollars?”
“Well, you look like a gynecologist,” I said. Mark was wearing a monogrammed cable-knit sweater and khakis.
“What does that even mean?”
“It means you look old,” I told him. “And, you know, perverted.”
“What do you want me to do? Wear tight jeans and roll my own cigarettes? I’m a grown man.”
“Rolling your own is better for you,” I said quietly, collecting the last crumbs of my cinnamon scone. “Less tar.”
Mark groaned and finished his coffee. “You’re not in love,” he said. Then he paused to watch a girl in a short skirt bend over to tie her shoe. A few days earlier I would have clung to the image for weeks—the lines of her panties under the opaque black tights, the soft dimpling down the backs of her thighs. When she stood back up, her thick brown hair seemed to undulate around her shoulders in slow motion. Her face was irreverent, almost pug-nosed, mean and adorable. But I was unaffected. I had Britt Wendt now. Other girls meant nothing to me. “So are you going to buy the couch?” Mark asked finally. “Where would you even put it?”
? ? ?
For the past year I’d been renting a room month to month for $350 cash in a flophouse owned by a Hasidic slumlord. I had to myself an eight-by-eight, windowless corner of the building, which had once housed a plant that manufactured little tongue-colored erasers. The place still smelled vaguely of burning rubber. My room was on the top level. The other tenants up there were all hip young people. I didn’t know anyone’s name. Downstairs, Middle Eastern gypsy cab drivers slept in shifts on bunk beds, their black sedans parked outside like a presidential cavalcade. Streetside, there was a soaped-up storefront full of car parts and broken computers. The building should have been, and probably was, condemned.
The only furniture I had was a twin mattress and a low glass coffee table, on top of which I piled my shoes, each pair in a Ziploc freezer bag to keep the vermin and roaches out. The walls between the rooms were single sheets of gypsum board. Hand-drawn signs in the crumbling hallways read: NO BEDBUGS! NO STREET MATTRESS! NO HOMELESS! The place had two communal bathrooms full of silverfish and a shared kitchen full of mice. I was constantly looking for a sublet or a room in an apartment or a cheap studio, but nothing seemed good enough. I couldn’t commit. Plus, I was always broke. I kept spending all my money on clothes.
Christmas morning, I was woken up by my neighbors having sex. Usually I’d pound on the gypsum, but that morning, in the spirit of the holiday and in honor of true love, I let the grunting slide. I stayed under my comforter with my laptop on my crotch, listening to the sex sounds and Googling Britt Wendt for the thousandth time. The Britt Wendt I found on Myspace was twelve years old, lived in Deering, New Hampshire, and posted inspirational photos of nature scenes with captions about how to be your best self, jokes about periods, links to articles about Olympic skating and beauty pageants. The only other Web pages that came up for “Britt+Wendt” were Swedish genealogies. My Britt Wendt was a mystery. I looked at her business card again. It was minimal, just her name and e-mail address and the words “redesigned antiques.” The font was generic, Arial bold. The card stock, flimsy. It was like she just didn’t give a shit. After my neighbors finished, I heard them walking down the hall to the showers. I considered visiting my go-to site for porn but chose not to. With Britt Wendt to pine for, watching videos of strangers having sex felt sacrilegious, like squirting a mayonnaise packet into your mouth while riding the elevator up to Per Se.
“Hi Britt” is how I decided to begin my e-mail.
It took thirty minutes of Google image searching to find a photo of an ottoman that conveyed what I wanted to convey: I lived in an expensive converted loft, had a very high-quality camera, and was an organized and broad-minded music aficionado and reader of literature. The photo was perfect—sunlight streaming in through a wall of opaque factory windows, neat shelves of books and records, the corner of an electric guitar leaning against the exposed brick wall in the background. The source of the photo was the for-sale section of craigslist in Providence, Rhode Island. The ottoman itself was just a lame, gray, fabric-covered cube. The legs were short, angular, blond wood stubs. I could tell it was a factory piece from the 1950s and worth more than the fifteen dollars the seller was asking, but not much more. I understood that I’d be deceiving Britt Wendt by claiming ownership of this ottoman, but I reasoned that as soon as she fell in love with me—perhaps she already had—the existence of furniture or lofts, any trite reality, would become laughably irrelevant. So I downloaded the photo, adjusted the levels in Photoshop, attached it to my e-mail, and wrote, “It’s the dude about the stoned hunters and the chaise longue from the other day. Would love your ideas and a rough quote on reupholstering this ottoman (attached) in vintage leather from your Texas roadkill or other source. Merry Xmas?” I signed my name “Nicholas (Nick) Walden Darby-Stern” and added my phone number. “P.S. Did the chaise longue sell? Still pondering . . .” How could she not love me now? I wondered.